Network booting, or boot-strapping, is the process of booting a computer from a network device rather than a local drive. During the network boot, one available strategy is to perform an operating system (OS) installation process. During the typical network boot initiated installation, there is limited visibility into the packages that were installed on a node and the configuration of the node once the network boot and OS installation process is complete. The boot process is typically driven by an OS Install script (either static or dynamic) that is supplied by the server, and most log files are stored to the local device making them unavailable to external participants. Once the script is delivered to the node that is going through the network boot process, however, there is typically little interaction between the node and the server that supplies the install packages (other than the exchange of the packages themselves).
Razor is a hardware provisioning solution for data centers developed by Puppet Labs and EMC Corp. Razor employs an in-memory instance of a microkernel executing on a node. The in-memory microkernel discovers the hardware on the node, such as central processing units, disks and memory, and reports the node inventory information to a Razor node state manager in real-time.
A need exists for methods and apparatus for monitoring a node during and after a boot process.